Minolta XM

The XM was a fantastic camera! I owned two of them -- not at once unfortunately, but one at a time. My first XM body was stolen while travelling on train in Spain. The second one I wore down to the bones on my way towards an auto focus system. Its shutter just stopped working at one point, and I was unable to repair it myself and unwilling to pay anybody to do it for me. I bought both of them used in a local shop, and it was sheer luck that I was able to find them.

The XM was a perfect camera for a guy like me. It was a fantastic photographic tool and it had all the facilities that a guy could dream of including such luxurious things as exchangeable finders, automatic exposure, lots of controls and altogether a very well thought through system camera. It was quite innovative in many areas, but still lagged commercially behind its competitors from Nikon (F2) and Canon (F-1).

Over the years I was able to get my hands on several nice accessories such as a couple of finders -- plain prism and vertical finder -- and several different focusing screens.

High performance

I remember the XM as a real high performance camera with an immediate reaction to almost anything I did. Its fastest shutter speed was an amazing 1/2000th of a second, which was something back then.

The feeling of this camera was one of metal. I don't remember many parts that were plastic. The metal covering the finder -- which I still have -- is brass with a layer of black paint. Mine has been battered so much that the paint is coming off in places. The ability to change the finder was actually very useful, and I used my vertical finder a lot. This was just a shaft shading the focusing screen and as such a perfect waist level finder, which I only have found since in my digital Canon Powershot A80 with its flip out LCD. The vertical finder also had a magnifier built-in, which gave very good focussing control when shooting macro at a low stance.

Links

More about the XM can be found on
Photography in Malaysia

But apart from that there isn't much good information on the web about this excellent camera, which I really loved.
One can be found for sale now and then, but apart from that I never see any.